1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique of linking data between applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is sometimes the case that system modifications are required so that information, displayed in a display screen of an application (hereinafter referred to as a target APL), can be used by other applications (hereinafter referred to as a linkage APL). In such a case, according to conventional art, the following procedure is followed.    1) A screen displaying data items of the target APL is output on paper etc., and by manual effort, the required data items from the screen are re-entered in the linkage APL.    2) Both APLs are modified so that data linkage between the target APL and the linkage APL can be realized.
According to the conventional art, because the procedure 1) requires manual effort during the working operation, a problem of a burden of data input is caused and incorrect-input might occur. In the procedure 2), not only the linkage APL but also the target APL must be modified, and therefore the scale of system development becomes large, increasing development budgets and development time which is a problem. Also when the developer of the target APL is different from that of the linkage APL, disclosure of confidential information may be required, and therefore the target APL cannot be modified without the consent of both developers.
According to Japanese unexamined patent publication bulletin No. 08-83285, a system, which retrieves data output on paper as image data using a scanner, recognizes an area displaying characters from the image data, generates character code from the image data in the recognized area and registers the character code in a database, is described.
According to Japanese unexamined patent publication bulletin No. 10-240901, a system, which stores layout rules of document structure in advance, accumulates image data of the document, analyzes layout of the accumulated data based on the layout rules, extracts the character pattern from the image data based on the analysis result, recognizes the character from the extracted character pattern, and stores the results of character recognition in a file, is disclosed.
Both inventions allow the elimination of the reentry by manual effort described in the procedure 1). However, in order to realize data linkage between programs, both inventions still have the problems that it is required that the screen is output on paper and the target APL and the linkage APL to be modified.